His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
-- Joyce from Dubliners (The Dead)

Read again in steam of tea and drafty kitchen telephone: D. counseling "the saddest person in the world" as happens when she calls, which is only when like this. Remembering that white phone unanswered, those days under covers, and finding empathy even mid-eyeroll. Kindness, compassion, a firm boundary.